Skip to main content
Company Relevance Signals are article-level fields inside media_item. They help distinguish articles that are primarily about the company from articles where the company is only mentioned in passing, as context, as background noise, or in peripheral page elements such as related-story tabs, modules, or other adjacent content that is not central to the article itself. These are not event-level fields because they describe the source article as a whole, not any one extracted event object. The media_item is always scoped to the security defined in entity, and any events extracted from that article are interpreted in relation to that same security.

​
Why this layer exists

A company can appear in an article in very different ways. For example, some articles are clearly centered on Apple. Others only mention Apple as a benchmark, competitor, historical reference, or side note. That distinction matters because a passing mention is not as useful as an article where Apple is the main subject. These signals help answer a few simple questions:
  • is the company the main focus of the article?
  • is the company mentioned in the title?
  • how often is the company mentioned?
  • how early does the company appear in the article?

​
Fields

​
focus_of_article
focus_of_article is a simple article-level focus flag.It is set to true when the company is the main focus of the article, and false when the company is only mentioned in passing or as background context.
​
mentioned_in_title
mentioned_in_title records whether the company is mentioned in the article title.This is a simple prominence signal. A title mention often indicates that the company is central to the piece, although it should be interpreted alongside the other relevance fields.
​
entity_count
entity_count records how many times the company is mentioned in the article.This is a rough prominence signal rather than a standalone relevance judgment. Higher counts often indicate greater centrality, but repetition alone does not guarantee that the company is the true focus of the piece.
​
first_sid_mentioned
first_sid_mentioned records the first sentence ID (sid) in which the company appears.
These fields are best read together. focus_of_article is the primary relevance judgment, while mentioned_in_title, entity_count, and first_sid_mentioned are supporting prominence signals.

​
How to interpret them

These signals are designed to support filtering and prioritization. For example:
  • an article with focus_of_article = true, mentioned_in_title = true, and an early first_sid_mentioned is more likely to be directly about the company
  • an article with focus_of_article = false, a low entity_count, and a late first_sid_mentioned is more likely to be incidental or background mention coverage

​
Where they sit in the payload

These signals form part of the media_item group because they describe article-level relevance rather than event-level meaning. 
{
  "media_item": {
    "entity_count": 33,
    "mentioned_in_title": true,
    "focus_of_article": true,
    "first_sid_mentioned": 1
  }
}

​
The core idea

Company Relevance Signals help answer a simple but important question: is this article really about the company, or is the company only part of the background context? By keeping those signals explicit at the article level, ViceWire makes it easier to filter, rank, and interpret coverage before or alongside the event-level output.